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Message-ID: <38FFBD97.2EC7C300@eng.sun.com>
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 19:31:51 -0700
From: James Duncan Davidson <james.davidson@eng.sun.com>
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To: ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org
Subject: Re: Ant Principles
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> But in doing so, you've proposed:
> 
>     style -- String defaults
>     file  -- rich file type, defined with a string
> 
> I'm not sure that the extra typing given this way is worth not just
> calling them properties and throwing out the ${...} usage.

So, I haven't yet seen your response (off-line), but as I work through a
draft of the document, I can see where you'd need typing of this nature. 

    properties = just strings, could be cast to proper types
    style = default setting for element attribs that aren't
        set. Can be cast to proper type
    filedef = file definition, can be used in script as

The one thing they all have is a name key, this would allow them to be
mixed on property settings as they come in on the command line, etc.

So, let's look at use cases.... (thinking aloud)

    <javac destdirid="dest" | destdir="build/classes>

So in this case, there isn't a need to define a separate type. The Javac
task could have one attribute that accepts destdir callouts that looked
into the prop list and one that specified an actual file path. One thing
that I think I read from your post was that you might be amicable to
just tossing the use of the direct file path and using the callouts from
the prop list. Was this what I read, or did I misread?

Style... This does seem to need to be a separate type as the name key
seems to want to be of [task].[attname]... Or maybe if an att isn't
listed and the reflector sees a prop of form [task].[setName] it'll
reflect in the string casting as appropriate? Would this work and let us
collapse everything to props? Or is that way to subtle?

.duncan